Paying Attention

There are some books where I can read them and not have to pay attention to paying attention but this one, The Orchard Keeper, is one that I do have to do that (pay attention to paying attention). This is also how it was when I first started reading Suttree but when I got farther along in the book I did not have to pay as much attention to paying attention. When I'm reading a book where I have to pay attention to paying attention and I forget to pay attention I usually start thinking about other things. Sometimes some of my best thinking happens when I forget to pay attention to a book that I need to pay attention to. My eyes keep reading and the times when I am thinking how I would say the words out loud with my mouth but doing that only in my head (with the silent mouth in my head) but they aren't becoming words in my head, only sounds that sound like words but aren't real sounds becuase they are silent and only in my head. This makes me think maybe that I should always keep a book like this around when I need to do some thinking, but maybe if I tried to have it happen on purpose it wouldn't work. But makes me think that maybe if it is true that it wouldn't work to use a book like this to get some thinking done that I should maybe try to think that I am going to try to do some thinking when I start reading the book because then maybe I could trick my brain into paying attention without having to pay attention to that. This is like the time my sister Mariah was reading The Great Gatsby for school and I was going to read it with her so we could talk about it but instead I decided to listen to the book-on-tape-on-ipod but every time I tried to listen to it I fell asleep (it was always at night right before bed). Anyway, the one time I got very far in the book-on-tape at all was the one time when I was feeling unsleepy and I decided to turn it on to try to help myself fall asleep. Like I said this having to pay attention to paying attention thing also happened with Suttree. I recently read All The Pretty Horses and it only happened a few times when reading that book, last year when I read The Road it did not happen at all. Those books are much more straightforward though and maybe easier to pay attention to. Sometimes when I have read a page and realize halfway down the next page that I have no idea what has been happening I go back and I am trying so hard to pay attention that I stop remembering what I read two lines ago! It is hard to stay in the middle, paying attention only enough. I am on page 22. Sometimes I have to read pages twice but that is okay.